souls while they are still alive, as if they were already dead; and give much alms to this end. Those who have not the means for this, fast and mortify themselves. In this province the ministers have begun to give the most holy sacrament of the communion to the natives, as being adult in the faith. They prepare themselves for the communion with great devotion. As there are no masses except on the great feasts, some prepare themselves as if they were to communicate every month, being contented with spiritual communion. The hand of the Lord hath wrought this; for the ministers had this success, with a race speaking a foreign language, one which the missionaries did not know as thoroughly as their own, while when these same men preached to those of our own nation and language, their words have had no such effect. The fault is in the hearers, who are unwilling to profit by the good which God has sent them." Here the report of Venavides ends. Other reports have been sent to España of the perfect devotion of these people. One of these tells how the Indians crowd the churches at the time of confession, fast, and communicate regularly; how many of the married ones live a great part of the time not as man and wife but as brother and sister--in particular, during Lent, and for some days before communicating; how there would be no end to the good that might be said about these people; and how some of them are of very good intelligence, and ingenious in asking questions which make the ministers reflect. This report is by father Fray Juan de Sancto Domingo, afterward a holy martyr in Japon. [37] It is dated at Magaldan, a village of Pangasinan, November 8, 1618. Father Fray Bernardo de Santa Catalina or Navarro, the apostle to this tribe, one of whose reports bears date of Manila, the twenty-fourth of [sic] one thousand six hundred and twelve, says that the great care manifested by our religious in following the rules of the order has given them power to overcome these unconquerable tribes. He reports that the number of persons baptized in the province of Pangasinan has grown from a few new-born boys to ten thousand, and that the number of those in this region who are prepared for heaven is constantly increasing.] CHAPTER XXII Of the persecution of the religious by the Indians, at the beginning; and of their later heartfelt conversion.